The gender approach in NESTORE: cognitive coaching
Research has shown sex differences in relation to cognitive capacities between men and women. How does that inform the way NESTORE will support older people in remaining cognitively fit? The University of Zurich explains.
Men have been found to show better performance in tasks where they had to see, identify and analyse visual forms for instance to orientate themselves (visuospatial functioning). On the contrary, women outperform men in the areas of expressing themselves with words (verbal functioning), remembering personal experiences at specific times and places (episodic memory) as well as performing some mental task rapidly.
Other research in later life has shown, however, that taking differences in education into account, women in fact outperform men in many cognitive tasks, but that men and women show comparable rates of change over the adult and later life years (e.g., Gerstorf, Herlitz, & Smith, 2006).
In the cognitive training domain, sex differences are not very evident, but have to be particularly considered when it comes to selecting the test material. Some verbal material, for example, may favor one group over the other: women may know more about food than men, so a verbal fluency test on food categories may disfavor men. Computer-based training, including video-game training, may favor those individuals with prior experience, and typically more men than women engage in video games.
NESTORE offers a wide range of cognitive activities that use different kinds of gender-neutral stimuli. The incorporated serious game has no obvious gender-favoring theme and color design, for instance. Similarly, a wide range of unstructured leisure activities are suggested for users to choose from based on their preferences. Therefore, the cognitive coaching domain has been designed with the slight sex differences in cognition and other preferences in mind.
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